You shoulda been there. More than 20 of us were and though the meeting went long, just over an hour, the program on the VECTOR NETWORK ANALYZER was worth it. Gary K8JOK, our new club Pres for 2022, is competent, organized, and really delves into a variety of Ham issues.
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The VNA has both a wide range signal generator and receiver plus sufficient computer power to generate a nice graph on the included display. The model that Gary bought has a 4 inch display rather than the 3 inch the cheapie models have. The MFJ 259 has the generator and receiver, but is only good for 1 freq at a time. It’s nice to have a chart.
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You can do most of the MFJ functions on this VNA. You can also measure inductive impedance, and that’s the secret Gary showed us to Reducing Noise in your receiver using a choke in the antenna feedline. He used the VNA to determine the impedance of the choke versus freq (most effective around 3.8 Mc and still very worth while up to 20M) and put the choke in his feedline. (It’s made by wrapping the coax around a pair of ferrite cores.) Your receiver gets its signal from the antenna, but if there isn’t a balun or other device to decouple the OUTSIDE of the coax braid, then you also get signal from that. Putting a couple of turns of coax (near the antenna) reduces received signal from that source.
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Note: An instrument using similar parts, signal generator and receiver, results in a Spectrum Analyzer, normally a multi kilobuck item, but like this VNA is available off EBay or Amazon for under a hundred bucks. See listings for something labeled “Tiny SA” on those sites.